Towards a more realistic population of bright spiral galaxies in cosmological simulations

Understand

We present an update to the multiphase SPH galaxy formation code by Scannapieco et al.

• We include a more elaborate treatment of the production of metals, cooling rates based on individual element abundances, and a scheme for the turbulent diffusion of metals.
• Our SN feedback model now transfers energy to the ISM in kinetic and thermal form, and we include a prescription for the effects of radiation pressure from massive young stars on the ISM.
• We calibrate our new code on the well studied Aquarius haloes and then use it to simulate a sample of 16 galaxies with halo masses between 1x10^11 and 3x10^12 M_sun.